Grim Britannia

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
craner said:
I always like the way that these grim streets and terraces etc have aspirational names like Mozart Cottages. That's the spirit of the '45 Attlee administration!
Click to expand...
Yeah I was thinking that. In Grove near where I grew up it was a quickly growing new town/village and it had areas with loads of new roads and they were all given the most bland but dishonest names - you had one area where all the streets were named after ducks, one where they were all named after trees, another all prime ministers.... no connection to what had been there before, completely different from when if something was called duckpond road it was cos it led to the duckpond, or at least it used to.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
IdleRich said:
Yeah I was thinking that. In Grove near where I grew up it was a quickly growing new town/village and it had areas with loads of new roads and they were all given the most bland but dishonest names - you had one area where all the streets were named after ducks, one where they were all named after trees, another all prime ministers.... no connection to what had been there before, completely different from when if something was called duckpond road it was cos it led to the duckpond, or at least it used to.
Click to expand...
The ultimate in this is surely Rivendell Gardens (Wolverhampton), Lothlorien Close (Derby), etc. (Yes, those are both real, I just looked them up.)

Sounds like Corpsey heaven!
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Incidentally, I can't believe we've had a thread about 70s British grimness go on for this long without mention of the superb Scarfolk Council.

scarfolk1.jpg

scarfolk2.jpg

scarfolk3.jpg
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
The escape from grimness we seem to be documenting in this thread is basically a triumph of technologies of production and distribution isn't it? All those cheap electronics made in China, all those nice clothes worked up in sweatshops in Bangladesh, with computers organsing it all. Maersk containers zipping all over the globe. The implied shadow underlying this thread would seem to be a huge success for material culture. "A World Transformed" (not sure this is what Momentum meant though).

I'm not saying much new here, just making this explicit. Weird for me 'cos I am old enough to remember the change, just about.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
I've been thinking lately maybe the wealth creation aspect of Thatcherism was a huge success, though it was global, and not just down to her.
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
luka said:
it's washyourhands continually punching a mentally ill man in the face at a bus stop. it's bricks through windows of a Pakistani family home in Blackburn. it's football hooligans making everyone around them totally miserable. it's British soldiers in Belfast oppressing Shiels' relatives. it's Gary Glitter on TOTP. it's all a little before my time.
Click to expand...

3 of these are a tad geo-specific generalisations and for my own part a paranoid schizophrenic was disarmed. Try Hyson Green for a few years. Eventually the same thing will happen to you.


luka said:
i think we all feel massive nostalgia for the period, despite not having lived through it. we did grow up among its ruins.
Click to expand...

70's kid and lived through it. Power cuts, ltd working weeks, post-industrial nightmare. For my Dad, either you were a union man and up for taking on management with the use of force, or you were a traitor regardless of sectarianism. There's a resilience there that's missed a bit in this thread. Not solidarity in being miserable commies, more 'we will get through these cunts and their agendas' because there wasn't a choice. The grimness of the British isles is eternal, but there's a spirit to it all, a spirit of resilience that, again, is glossed over a bit too much in these discussions.

It's not an aesthetic, it's called poverty. Poverty of aspiration is only one aspect though. First its immediate and direct counterpoint, which Craner's model pics nail. Overt, unattainable, middle-class marketing pastiches. Second, all the building pictures. However, only the improvised playground pic gets to the heart of what i'm attempting to convey. Yes, never going to win building of the year comps (unless portrayed like they are here, well done to the photographers among you), but we grew up having so much fun in these places. The best adventure playgrounds of all time and all with a local nonce who you'd better know about, otherwise...

It never went away though. It got worse in the 80's because of heroin, the historical differences between north and south compounded by Maggie's crew, the rise of the mullet and tache look, football firms in town EVERY fucking weekend. The only thing that changes is your own age. Your perspectives broaden, but you still feel blessed for the freedoms afforded by smashing up abandoned mine workings, destroying empty tenements or best of all, a new building site that afforded mock battle fields, climbing frames AND timber/piping that could then be sold on for a raise. Do you know how many cola bottle sweets that equated to?

Embrace the grim because it's always out there, lurking, waiting, ready to embrace you and you better have an answer when it calls.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Presumably if you're gay or black or asian or a woman, etc. the 2010s would have been much better.

Corpsey said:
My dad was telling me yesterday about growing up in the 50s and how awful it was. There were 3 radio stations and they were the olde worlde equivalent of Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4.
Click to expand...

Perhaps what luka was getting at earlier (probably not, he'll slap me down for this i'm sure) is that for the lucky among us the world is too nice now.

Now we've got every radio station in the world, we can access any piece of music in the world, everything's been absorbed into the mainstream, there's no hidden cultures, everything runs smoothly, it's all a bit nice but boring.

I'm sure life is still pretty/bloody horrible for people at the bottom of the economic pile, though.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
Corpsey said:
Presumably if you're gay or black or asian or a woman, etc. the 2010s would have been much better.



Perhaps what luka was getting at earlier (probably not, he'll slap me down for this i'm sure) is that for the lucky among us the world is too nice now.

Now we've got every radio station in the world, we can access any piece of music in the world, everything's been absorbed into the mainstream, there's no hidden cultures, everything runs smoothly, it's all a bit nice but boring.

I'm sure life is still pretty/bloody horrible for people at the bottom of the economic pile, though.
Click to expand...

Freud would have something to say about the inherent dissatisfaction of living, even when we have what we (think we) want. I can't remember the exact turn of phrase in Freud - anyone?
 
sufi

sufi

lala
this:
pattycakes_ said:
Worse. The 70s was dilapidated and the internet has wreaked havoc on our minds
Click to expand...

@WYH, are you still in glasgow?
my seventies were in Bristol, where my dad, a junior professional on the bottom of the ladder was surprised to move from a flat in london to a nice big house in a good street in a nice neighbourhood. We weren't in poverty (though we did play on the bombsites) but there was a material poverty that's hard to relate to now, almost no electronics or plastic, nothing disposable, a more reliable and solid materialism
and no mass media smog in every crevice, so no current affairs cult or celebrity sacrifice rituals infiltrating every home
cultural forms that existed had mostly existed for centuries, not ephemera

i've been reading some Bristol novels from that era, they feel like they are right on the cusp of this explosion into our current hypermodernity - people's consciousness was not so different - ideologies and identities were similar to now, but our way of life seems to have changed a lot

if it was a grim time, i wonder if we see it more positively now than when this thread was started
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top